Don't really think the 1st Amendment has anything to do with this. For better or worse, the White House is Trump's residence during his time in office. He can invite or not invite who ever he wants to his residence. Being invited to the White House is a privilege, NOT a right. Behave in a way that irritates the President, get kicked out. Fairly simple time honored concept.

Apple did pull a bunch of Supermicro units out of service about the time the story claimed the chips were discovered. Apple claimed a firmware issue. Believable cover story if there really were spy chips. Amazon did sell off one of their China operations about the time the story claimed Supermicro boards were found in the China operation. Amazon claimed the sale was due to increasing China Govt interference in their operations. Again, a believable cover story as China is increasingly exerting government oversight over Internet in China. Further, the story claimed the magic chips were added at a sometimes used subcontractor for Supermicro. Unlikely that batch number 3 from a subcontractor would get the same QA look over that the first qualification batch would get, making it a better time to add the magic chip.

But at some point, a modified board needs to be produced and that hasn't happened. Where did the retired Apple servers go? Either there are magic chips on them or not. Unlikely we could inspect the former Amazon China operation at this point for compromised boards.

Given the failure to produce a modified motherboard, might be worth investigating any possible connection between the folks that reported this story and people/companies that made money from the large drop in Supermicro stock.

USENET got screwed over by several politicians uttering that dread mantra "Think of the Children!" because a very small piece of USENET carried channels where folks could talk about pedophilia and exchange files. Instead of encouraging the moderation of those few channels, the pols instead strong armed the ISPs to drop USENET from their free offerings. The likely real reason was the fairly large exchange of files the large media companies claimed were pirated content.

Instead of using a paid USENET provider, a lot of folks switched to things like Yahoo Groups.

If the politicians really get involved in this fight, wonder if we will see a repeat.

Given the grief law enforcement got over failing to act on the many reported postings and activities the the Parkland shooter made, going to have to side with the Police on this one. If Owens was planning something and carried it out and the Police had failed to act on the Facebook posting, we would be having an entirely different discussion.

Seems like the Police handled this fairly lightly. It wasn't a no-knock raid in the middle of the night. Just a quick Q&A session after which Owens went about his business.

Funny how the argument "Think of the Children" gets lost when the government wants to use kids as leverage against the parents.

And it is absolutely shocking that a company that uses the Internet as a conduit for its business would make payments to Internet Service Providers. Pretty much proof of criminal activity right there. What's next? Charging folks with paying their electric bill?

This whole thing highlights the failure of copyright today. "Limited" as stated in the Constitution has basically become unlimited due to Congress being bought off by large media companies and the courts going along with rulings that say "limited" is whatever Congress says it is. Imagine the howling if Congress applied the same "limited" term to patents as they currently do to copyright. Since both come from the same section of the Constitution, hard to see how the courts could argue without overturning their previous rulings on this.

I think Chicago's problem is that for decades it has been ran by the Daley machine. While the current mayor isn't named Daley, he has pretty much followed the script with similar results. Until that changes, unlikely that mere court orders and study findings will change things.

$350,000,000 for a known bad map? There is part of the problem. Wonder how many rural locations that could setup for fiber?

I got lucky in my new rural location and can get 12mb DSL. The tech said if I was a 1/2 mile farther from the fiber ran up the highway, likely no service at all. Yet the whole area is a solid 10+mb speed on the last map I saw.

Hard to get too concerned about security when the basic business model of far too many companies(campaign contributors) includes being able to monitor, track and data mine the personalized tracking devices most folks carry.

I found it interesting that once Google announced that OKC was on the list to get Fiber, all of a sudden, both Cox and AT&T started pouring a lot of effort into upgrading service in OKC. When Google announced a halt in OKC, almost to the day, both AT&T and Cox radically slowed both upgrades and advertising. The Gigafiber coming soon signs in my neighborhood had just gone up when Google made the halt announcement. They quickly disappeared. AT&T fiber service wasn't made available until this year and started at 50Mb.

Wonder if they also are trying the Trademark everything for the name Gwen? Gwen is one of the main characters in the NCSoft game Guild Wars Eye of the North expansion. Would think the trying to Trademark anything to do with video games and related saleable stuff might run afoul of existing NCSoft marks and copyrights on Gwen, assuming that NCSoft obtained such.

Better yet, get off your lazy ass and register to vote and then vote. Especially in the local city council/sheriff elections. That is the level where most of the BS police policy gets set. Even better, file for office. Often a cheap way to get the issue into the public eye. Even if you don't spend much for your campaign, the local press will often do a who filed for office and what their platform is line up in the local paper. The filing fee, if any, is often cheaper then even a small ad in the local media.